Previously unreleased Haden and Hall duo album to be issued in the autumn.
Photo: bluenote.com
Duos have an intimacy jazz craves and desires. When the music loses two giants: Charlie Haden as recently as this month; Jim Hall last December, that sense of close contact with great practitioners of the art form listening to a record allows is especially pronounced in the setting of a duo, a process as here that now stirs memory, and especially gratitude for the sheer artistry and musicianship at play staving off any strong feeling of loss. This double bass and guitar album to be released in late-September, the first posthumous release featuring Haden, was recorded live in July 1990 a concert that marked the tenth anniversary of the Montreal Jazz Festival with an entire series dedicated to, and featuring, Haden at the festival that year.
Haden had recorded in Montreal the year before for ECM with the Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti but that would have to wait until 2001 for release, while Hall’s separate quartet album All Across the City had been released by Concord in 1989. The tracks here are Monk's ‘Bemsha Swing’ Haden on his own at the beginning with a solo the insistent descending refrain of which somehow summons an earworm of ‘Hit the Road Jack’, Hall gently trilling when he comes in, then ‘First Song’, Ornette Coleman’s ‘Turnaround’, ‘Body and Soul’, ‘Down From Antigua’, the longest of the eight tracks clocking in at more than 12 minutes, ‘Skylark’, ‘Big Blues’, and finally ‘In the Moment.’ Understated, quietly determined with a great deal of highly evolved and detailed duo interplay on all the tracks but especially on ‘Down From Antigua’, it’s an album to savour long into the night and in the years to come.